Magpie
Trudy Pirandello (nicknamed The Magpie by police at Fort Freak) is a minor character in the Wild Cards series of books. History Trudy Pirandello fell in with Dr. Tod's gang sometime prior to the first Wild Card Day in 1946. Mostly she just hung with the pack and made coffee while the boys were around, but this was enough for her to be present when Dr. Tod ordered experiments to be conducted with the newly discovered Xenovirus Takis A. Trudy was exposed to a spore herself, and when the tests resulted in horrible and fatal mutations in the test subjects, Trudy simply disappeared. She hadn't known it at the time, but she had become the world's first ace. On Wild Card Day she bore witness to the culmination of Dr. Tod's mad scheme to use the wild card to blackmail New York City, and watched as the spores rained down and changed the world forever. She bought an apartment at the upmarket Stuyvesant's Folly apartment building for an extremely low price when the previous inhabitants melted after being exposed to the wild card, and nobody else would touch the place. Her pin up model looks drew her into high society, and yet she still kept her ace a secret, even in days when wild card chic was at its greatest. From her rich apartment Trudy embarked on a life of crime, amassing a great many things over the years. In 2010 a string of thefts drew the attention of police at Fort Freak. Detectives McTate and Driscoll tailed her to her apartment and apprehended her. After being hauled before the court, she was placed under house arrest, with McTate grudgingly assigned to her as both a parole officer and a tenant. Wild Card Traits Trudy is able to teleport herself and other objects over unrevealed distances. The experience of teleporting herself makes her feel sick however, and so she used her ability in this manner sparingly, abandoning it altogether in later years. She is also an exoteleport, able to teleport items within her line of sight to herself. The precise range of her power, and the maximum weight of the items that she can retrieve, is unclear but she has been able to acquire a heavy diver's helmet from a window washer's platform attached to a building near the Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. Appearance In her youth, Trudy was a very attractive woman. By 2010 she had become an elderly, yet still able-bodied woman, often given to wearing a mask and a cloak whilst moving around Jokertown. Personality Trudy is a woman with questionable morals. The ease with with she could procure items quickly led her down an opportunistic path of thievery, which in later years bordered on the kleptomaniac. She is very selective about the things she steals, and most of those things she has conscious rational for taking. She also has a strong fondness for kittens, and justifies her theft of them from pet stores as a way to prevent them from being eaten. Selected Reading *